YOU STILL REALLY GOT ME

"I’m a 20th century man/But I don’t want, I don’t want to be here,” Ray Davies groaned while opening up the Kinks’ 1971 Muswell Hillbillies LP, a record that celebrated and memorialized his family’s life in North London. As Ray sang about nuclear and technological nightmares that still ring true today, his younger brother Dave played slide guitar that sounded like shrapnel from a bomb blast.

Both brothers would make it into the following century, but not easily. Ray, who was initially hesitant to embark on their inaugural and ill-fated American tour in 1965, citing the JFK assassination as a sign of a country in crisis, would ironically find himself plugged with lead in New Orleans in 2004. A few months later, Dave would be felled by a stroke in London. Thankfully, Muswell Hill’s Sons of Thunder survived their injuries (and each other).